students into Carolina and having them
have a great experience when they’re here.”

STEVE EXUM ’ 92

ognizing that those two things are inseparable. I mean, sometimes people come into this
office, they’re alumni, they look out the window at the Old Well and just start crying —
and you know, their academic experience is
part of it, their social experience is part of it,
the way the town is is part of it, the athletics
are definitely part of it.

“So I don’t think there’s any way to pick
apart those things and say we get X amount
of goodwill from one or the other of these,
so I’m going to leave that egg scrambled. It’s
not worth trying to unscramble it.”

graduate students and faculty and postdocs.
When you think about what it has meant to
higher education to have undergrads live on
campus, now think about what it could
mean for research and graduate education to
have grad students and postdocs live on a
campus. We have the opportunity to invent
that, and I think we can get the town
excited about collaborating with us on how
we do that.”

The 18 percent limit on out-of-stateenrollment

“I think as a practical matter it’s not
going to expand anytime soon, so that’s our
number. My personal opinion is that it’s not
a good thing for me to invest a lot of time
in trying to change. We’ve done pretty well
with the 18 percent.You can make the case,
and I think convincingly, that it would
increase the diversity of the pool of students
and would enrich the lives of North Carolinians to have more out-of-state students
here, but we’ve been awfully successful with
it where it is.”

And for North Carolinians, the following
from a 2002 interview bears repeating:

“I think it should always be hard to get
into Carolina. If you’re a North Carolinian,
it’s an accomplishment and an honor to get
admitted to this University. It is not a right.
If we stop being selective, then we won’t
apply that pressure to people all over North
Carolina. There are people out in Iredell
County who are doing well in high school
because they want to come here. That’s a
motivating factor that no high school
teacher in the world can apply, and we cannot dilute that. That’s driving the quality of
our education system in a way that no
amount of standardized testing, Smart Start
or anything is going to do.”

What every undergraduate should do

“I’d love to see every undergraduate in a
first-year seminar. Right now we’re about
60 percent. And I’d love it if every undergraduate had an international experience
— we’re a long way off on that.”

Carolina North, the satellite campus

“I’m very excited about the idea of
moving the law school to Carolina North. I
think the other thing that I was quite vocal
about in the [town-gown] leadership advisory committee was the importance of having housing at Carolina North, especially for

In-state tuition for undocumented aliens

“I think we’re going to have to pay close
attention to how the law and the policy of
the system, how they evolve. Obviously,
there is disagreement about that, so until
that settles down, I don’t think it’s possible
for me to say a whole lot more about that
because we are going to operate within
what those two things end up dictating. My
interest is in getting the very best quality

Outside the classroom, what’s missing?

“I think what we probably don’t have
enough of is people coming together
socially around their academic interests.
You know, there’s a tendency for young
people to not admit they really love a subject — we need more of that both in K
through 12 and in college. You don’t see a
lot of people running down through Polk
Place shouting that they love chemistry and
classics. I wish the students felt more like
they could do that.”